Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) - How I Thought It Would Go...

 Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)
How I Thought It Would Go...

Hey, hey!  From the End Credit Scene for "Thunderbolts* (2024)" and the trailers for "The Fantastic Four: First Steps", my brain took those bits and pieces and made its own story as a sort of dime-store Kuleshov Effect (also known as Russian Montage Theory, where connected images can be turned into a story inside the minds of the viewers, named for Russian director, Lev Kuleshov, from his works in the 1910's and 1920's).

That story suggested Silver Surfer shows up declaring the world is marked for Death, Reed says "I dunno if y'all will be safe" as they all pile into a rocket ship, a world is destroyed, and a Multi-versal Ship shows up at the end of "Thunderbolts*".  It would have been darkly funny if they had done that, with the crowds of Earth first clapping and cheering them on to fight Galactus, and the having it dawn on them that they may not be coming back and they are hightailing it to the next universe over.  As I said, darkly, darkly funny.

Anyhoo, I was there opening night for "The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)", and while it was the best of the FF movies (damning with faint praise, I know) and it was great to see giant Galactus stomping through New York City, there were a number of things that missed the mark, IMHO.

I did really like the retro-future look of the movie, and the characterizations were very good, but there were a few parts of the story that didn't quite work for me.  Reed is supposed to be the smartest person in the world, but does a number of rather dumb things, IMHO.  "Galactus said he wanted our child in order to save the Earth.  Can you imagine?  Anyways, I'm gonna work on a device that teleports the entire Earth.  Here's to hoping it works!"  That plan seemed... less than ideal.

Also, the Thing's beard... Blech!  I didn't care for that all too much.

Of course, setting it in Universe 828 had an unexpected payoff that warmed my cold, dank heart (there was something about that universe name that caught my attention enough to remember the number until the end--I guess my unconscious was signaling me, but wasn't quite able to piece it together).  And, so as not to keep y'all in suspense, 8-28 is for August 28th, Jack Kirby's birthday.  Cool!

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STEP ONE:  Here are the Digital Inks, done on a 2,000px x 3050px canvas @300dpi in Clip Studio Paint.  'Cuz I'm a dum-dum, I accidentally deleted the pencils sometime when I wasn't paying attention, so no pencils to barely look at and move on past this time.

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STEP TWO:  Here are the digital colors.  Everything was a bit rushed, as I have so many other irons in the fire at the moment.  But, I wanted to get this done before October 1, 2025.

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Done Digitally in Clip Studio Paint.

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Happy (Belated) New Year 2021...

Happy New Year 2021!

My first post of the New Year... It still has that New Year smell and everything!  Better late than never, I guess.  Anyhoo, here's to hoping a New Year sweeps clean!

I want to take a few moments to thank everyone who has stopped by and gawked at my modest Blog.  Any attention is greatly appreciated!  (Wait, did that sound half of desperate as it seemed as I wrote it out?  Nah, couldn't be...)  Thank you, all!

I hope everyone stays safe and well this year!

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STEP ONE:  Here's the original rough idea, scribbled in Clip Studio Paint on the iPad.  I used a 1,500px x 2,250px document @ 600dpi.  It was going to be a far more of a straight up parody cover of "Fantastic Four #49", with various notes to myself.  This is definitely an early version when I was still kicking ideas around, so it's more of a peek behind the curtain.  Also, you get to see some of the lame jokes you missed!  Bullet dodged!

The way it played out in my head was to have Galactus as the stand in for 2021 destroying the previous, cursed year of 2020.  Hence the 2-0-2-0 on the chests of each of the Fantastic Four.

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STEP TWO:  After a lot of other noodling about (including entertaining other well-known comic covers to parody), I decided just focus on the more iconic part of the cover, with Galactus towering over the New Year.  Also, the "2-0-2-1" seemed to not show up very well, so I went with replacing the Fantastic Four with the actual numbers to spell out the year, but still left them with their arms and legs.  So, here's the digitally inked page.

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STEP THREE:  And, many color layers later, here's the finished pic.  I even remembered to write 2021... which I usually don't remember to write the New Year until mid-June, most of the time.  (Sadly, not kidding as much as I would like.  Sigh...)  ;-)

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Done digitally in Clip Studio Paint on an iPad Pro.

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Repaneld: Fantastic Four #5

Here's the original from "The Fantastic Four" #5 by Jack "King" Kirby and Joe Sinnot:

Here's yet ANOTHER submission to the delightful REPANELED Blog.  In this case, it is from "The Fantastic Four" #5, where the FF are transported back in time by Doctor Doom to get Blackbeard's treasure... it's a LONG story.  Well, not THAT long, but you know what I mean... and it's been reprinted plenty of times so go ahead and read it if you can!

Rather than my usual colorized black-and-white gouache paintings as done in some previous posts, this was done with charcoal on 12" x 18" Dick Blick Sulphite paper (80 lb).  For those of you who just can't get enough of the process, here it is.  For all the rest, be prepared to be bored!

STEP ONE:  With vine charcoal, I **VERY** loosely blocked in where I wanted everything to roughly fit on the page in an almost cartoonish manner.

STEP TWO:  And then almost immediately smeared the whole thing into an amorphous mess.  (That's the way I usually work with charcoal.)

STEP THREE:  I start to tighten up the drawing a bit with a 4B and 6B charcoal pencil and use my kneaded eraser a LOT--both to clean up the mess left by STEP TWO and to shape the form and add highlights.  Yes, kids, the eraser can ALSO be used to draw and not just erase mistakes.  :-)

I also settled on how I wanted Ben's pirate hat to look and, for my amusement, changed the original background guy in the panel to vaguely resemble a better-known pirate from a certain movie series.

STEP FOUR:  Ben Grimm (A.K.A., The Thing) is mostly done, now.  Again, this was done with continued layering of softer charcoal pencils and kneaded eraser to lift out lighter areas and highlights.  Time to work on that pirate fellow in the background...

STEP FIVE:  Well, here's the finished charcoal drawing.  I took a picture of it with my camera and then imported it into PhotoShop to colorize it.

STEP SIX:  Here it is colorized and cropped in PhotoShop, along with the added words.  It was basically the same method I used in previous posts: Over top the original picture, I added color on the Multiply Layer, as well as lightened some areas/retouched, and added a background with a generic Cloud Filter.

Done with charcoal on 12" x 18" Dick Blick Sulphite paper (80 lb.) and colorized in PhotoShop.

I realized a little too late that I didn't leave myself enough room to rotate the image a bit as I originally intended until after I had already copped it and got most of the way through colorizing.  I should have either drawn it at the tilted, Dutch-angle in the first place (preferred), or cropped it AFTER I rotate the image and BEFORE I start colorizing the image.  I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere for me.  :-)

Now that I look at it, I almost like the black-and-white charcoal drawing better than the colorized version.  Sigh...  On top of that, in comparison, I think Kirby did a better job of capturing the pathos of Ben Grimm (well, he **IS** the "King", after all).

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